Archive for Blogginz
What’s cookin’ in my cheesecake factory? Only my subscribers know!

As many of you who have read the blog post below this one know, MAD magazine is folding like one of Al Jaffee’s trademark fold-ins. Whoops, there goes another rubber tree plant! (Or as MAD themselves would have put it, “ShlaBOINK!! There goes another squamish pritz!!!)
Also, there goes another client for yours truly! So now is the time for me to get serious. I am going to step up my game and get this site updating with two strips a week to keep you coming back! (I want The Hero’s Journey completed almost as much as Roadkill wants to start peeling his quarry like an onion!)
It will take me about a month to get into that groove, as I have to bank some content, but I’m ready if you are! And there’s more: I am going to start putting out even more content on this site with the goal of getting Whatisdeepfried.com self-sufficient by the end of the year. But that will be up to you!
After 67 years, MAD magazine is packing it in.
As a client, MAD was the crown jewel of my very thin resume, and cartooning for them has definitely been the high-water mark of my career. I am proud of the features I created for them, and especially proud of the ones that seemed to really hit the public’s funny bone, such as Scooby Don’t and Detective Slow-On-The-Draw.
I’ve also had the rare distinction of helping pull the plug of both of MAD’s ventilators: appearing in the last New York-era issue published out of their Mad-ison Avenue offices, as well as in the eighth and nearly-final issue of the Burbank, CA relaunch that began last year when parent company Warner Bros. moved the operation across the country (a move which did not include almost any of the editorial talent that had steered the ship for decades.)
But even as MAD kicks the bucket, I still managed to scratch one goal off my own bucket list: dropping cameos of my favorite Internet personalities– Mike, Jay and Rich of Red Letter Media— into the background of “The Preposterous Palpatine Plothole” comic that I crafted with my friend and fellow NY MAD alum Jon Bresman. Talk about good timing!
Now, some might say that the common factor in MAD‘s repeated morbidity was my appearing in it, but we all know who really staked the magazine through the heart: Pete Buttigieg.
Just recently, Mayor Pete, in an effort to zing Donald Trump for comparing him to Alfred E. Neuman, told the press that he didn’t get the reference. “I’ll be honest. I had to Google that,” he said, in what was probably number three of the five daily salats he performs to prove his hipster bona fides to the kids. (The guy is nearly 40– he knows who fucking Alfred E. Neuman is.)
Did Buttigieg hand-wave MAD out of existence? If so, the joke is on him. The only thing worse than being in MAD was not being in it. And for a guy who is so earnest about appealing to the youngins, you’d think he’d have been more interested in showing up in MAD. It might have given his run for the White House some much needed traction.
MAD, you cracked Cracked, whacked Wacko, sicked-up on Sick, and, in a rare moment of generosity, helped Crazy get on the meds that have turned their life around. You were the Alpha and Omega of childhood bad taste. We shall not see your like again.
But by the grace of the Neuman, the Kaputnik and the Holy Klutz, I can say honestly and with pride (plus a little dyspepsia): ME NOT WORRIED!!
The man in the hard hat said
Your bark split years ago
And let in the rain
Which turned your heart black

I was once insulted on your behalf
When a grocery bag
Got tangled in your hair
But I never learned your name.
Were you “Beech”? “Poplar”?
We should have talked more.

Your dying gesture
Was to come to my window
And rap on the glass, saying
“Death is one ‘s self split in half.”

A white headstone marks your time on earth.
With you gone, my studio receives more light.
Thank you for the illumination.
The fine folks at the 11 O’Clock Comics podcast have given Weapon Brown probably the most glorious thumbs up I have ever received. Listen to the whole thing, but the important chunk, about Yours Truly, begins at 1:03:05.

It took a girl with a dragon tattoo and two Mr. Robots to solve my website problem, but I think I finally have the issue licked licked licked lickedTERMINALERROR500–$$$unexpected ampersand on line323–Homeland Security has been notified01010101010101*
Unfortunately, all this computer nonsense delayed my work on this week’s strip, so expect it in a few days. In the meantime, here’s a little something I threw together for May the Fourth!
Hello fan(s)! I have to deactivate most of this site’s features for the next couple of days while my web host and I try to track down a bug which is causing performance issues. The site will hopefully be back to normal by Monday.
Ugh… another Scott Atoms video! He’ll be the death of me… and possibly YOU!
Enjoy (if that’s the right word) my conversation with Peanuts enthusiast William Pepper as we both dissect the most controversial of the Peanuts holiday specials: It’s Arbor Day Charlie Brown!
Is it already time for a new one? I’m not done hating the last one!!
Thank you for the pebble, Master.
Dale is back to help Scott Atoms get some much-deserved attention for being a douche.
Hello frequent visitors! It is time to broach that subject that arises in every web content creator’s life: whether or not to create a Patreon account.
Starting in March I will begin producing the next installment of Deep Fried: The Hero’s Journey, followed by the conclusion of the first Kobayashi Maru story arc, and then onto Weapon Brown: Aftershock. All of these projects are comic books I would like to get into print, hopefully with the help of a publisher. If, however, I wind up going the Death Ray Graphics route, I will really need a much more dependable income stream to justify all the time these books will take to create.
This leads me to the path many before me have taken: Patreon. Patreon, for those who don’t know, is a subscription service that allows people to fund their favorite content creators by pledging to pay them a little money on a regular basis, usually collected monthly via Patreon from a subscriber’s credit card or PayPal. In return, subscribers get exclusive content and other goodies offered through different subscription tiers.
So, I would like some feedback on this idea. If you are a regular visitor, and if I began putting out a much improved workload of stuff for you to enjoy, what else would you want in order to be willing to pay for all this glory? Some of the ideas I have for Patreon backers would be:
- Exclusive “Pencilrama” posts
- Sign-up tchochkes
- Special variant cover editions of printed comics
- Unique video content (could be anything: animated cartoons, videos of me at work, riff tracks of your favorite movies??)
- AMAs
- Meet-and-greets
I have more ideas, but what I really want are YOUR ideas! What will get you more interested in Whatisdeepfried.com, and thus get ME more interested in putting out even more content? Let’s work together on this! Please comment below.
Vermont’s Montpelier Times Argus had the audacity to disparage my favorite presidential candidate in a recent editorial. I had no choice but to to show up at their offices with 900 words of gasoline!
UPDATE: By popular demand, for all you fr’ners who can’t read the Times Argus overseas, here is the text of the editorial.
Believe in Bernie
Recently, The Times Argus and Rutland Herald ran an editorial imploring Sen. Bernie Sanders not to run again for president in 2020. The arguments against his candidacy amounted to the same “perhaps in another time, another place” laments that were so often deployed against Sanders in 2016.
At first, I was pained to see this overly cautious attitude being presented as wisdom, but then I felt a spark of hope: At least, this time they are getting it out of their system early.
During the 2016 primary season that saw Hillary Clinton triumph over Sanders as the country’s progressive standard-bearer, one editorial after another warned of Sanders’ unviability in the general election: too old, too cantankerous, not risk-averse enough and wielding an agenda out of some hippie’s dream journal. The thinking went that this veritable outlaw of idealism could never conquer the imaginations of hidebound, dry toast America.
Donald Trump, the proof of the failed theory of the “hot potato candidate,” now squats in the Oval Office, firing off incoherent tweets hourly, plotting executive end-runs around the will of Congress … and enjoying a disturbing level of popularity for it. He may soon be selecting his third Supreme Court justice.
So, I am happy that the anti-Sanders sentiment that is brewing among many progressives is arriving sooner rather than later. Hopefully, they will get over their cold feet quickly, because we need Sanders now more than ever.
After Barack Obama’s re-election triumph over Mitt Romney on Election Night 2012, Democrats mocked the “bubble mentality” of conservatives who had deluded themselves about Romney’s strength. Today, it is the Democrats who are in a bubble, certain that Trump fatigue and Robert Mueller will pave the way for a safe, Beltway liberal to return us to normalcy. They have grown so cocky, in fact, that they can barely contain their glee at clipping the wings of upstart Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself an early warning sign of a restive progressive base.
But, who today could trust the Democrats to read the tea leaves correctly? Trump has proven himself to be a poll-defying master of electronic media, a creature custom-built for the empty, ratings-driven TV show of presidential politics. In 2020, his eccentricities will be more than offset by the power of his office and his complete control over a neutered Republican Party that he has broken to his will.
Now look at who Nancy Pelosi and the donor class would have us ooze over: Joe Biden, the 76-year-old perennial bridesmaid with a #MeToo target on his chest; Elizabeth Warren, once the Great White Hope of the slightly left-of-center, but now publicly owned by Trump’s schoolyard taunts; and Beto O’Rourke, a typical Third Way Dem who hopes that being a cool, purple-state Fonzie will compensate for his unambitious program. If one of these “safe bets” is standing underneath the balloons when they drop at the DNC convention, God help us.
Which brings us back to Sanders. Few can argue with his charm or his fidelity to the causes that liberals often only pay lip service to. But then comes that fear of the unknown, of Sanders as the divider of the already “well-fractured Democratic Party” (to quote this newspaper).
It’s time liberals ask themselves what they are really afraid of: Sanders as a wedge, or Sanders as the glue?
Take health care. After decades of tinkering at the edges of reform, Democrats finally gave us the Affordable Care Act, a conservative, think-tanked solution that is riddled with all the errors and inefficiencies that naturally flow from placating the health insurance industry. The ACA is now a moving target, always on the brink of being sabotaged. And it would be … except for the fact that the public — left and right — actually wants more of what the ACA has promised.
But, while the half-a-loaf Democrats continue to appease an obsolete health care bureaucracy, it is the Sanders wing that unapologetically states the obvious: that the inevitable endgame must be Medicare for all.
Sanders’ position on that topic is the unity position. His is the clear voice rising above a din of confusing non-solutions. The “division” that concerns liberals is simply the fear of a leader sticking to his guns while his party wrings its hands. But, so what? Our country has already shown that it has patience to spare when it comes to Trump’s tantrums over his concrete border monstrosity; I think we’ll be just fine with a little friction in service of universal health insurance.
Now is the time for liberals to make their peace with the left, not the other way around. The left will not be press-ganged into obedience in 2020 simply because “the stakes are too high.” When aren’t the stakes too high? The Democrats have lived in terror of a leftist candidate since George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon. The specter of that loss even led Rolling Stone magazine to repent of its youthful arrogance and declare for Clinton over Sanders in 2016, because “America chooses its presidents from the middle, not from the ideological wings.”
Rolling Stone spoke on behalf of all of America’s benighted centrists when it chose not to endorse Sanders’ “intoxicating … great hopes and dreams.” Instead, it put its chips on Clinton’s soaring “incremental progress.” Now, thanks to the ideology of almighty caution, Clinton’s loss has become the new standard for political miscalculation. At last, McGovern’s ghost can rest.
You can try to diminish Sanders by calling him a rumpled symbol for hopeless dreamers. You can call him an imprudent spoiler. You can curse his movement’s “purity testing” while trying to torpedo his reputation over some small-bore indiscretions by his campaign staff … it isn’t going to work. Yes, Sanders is an idealist. And in 2020, the race had better have at least one of them.
Jason Yungbluth is the author of the graphic novel “Weapon Brown,†and an adjunct professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.